Egypt’s Fascinating Past

The term “ancient Egypt” refers to a multitude of places and a civilization spanning nearly 4,000 years, whose remains were buried in sand and history for another millennium and a half. (In other words, we are closer in time today to the latest known Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were created around 400 CE, than those writings are to the first hieroglyphs ever carved in stone around 3100 BCE!)

Around 830 Ce, nearly two centuries after the Arab conquest of Egypt, the Caliph al-mamun is said to have made his way inside a gigantic building of longstanding mystery: the great Pyramid of Giza. But the modern history of Egyptology doesn’t begin until 1798, when the French army under Napoléon Bonaparte made its way to Egypt. The following year, a French soldier stumbled across a rock inscribed in three writing systems—hieroglyphs, a later Egyptian script, and Ancient greek. Since all three represented the same text, and Greek was still familiar, the Rosetta Stone became the key to understanding the writings of ancient Egypt. Egyptology was born.

French, German, and British explorers, trained in the new social science of archeology, flocked to Egypt throughout the 19th century, taking away thousands of artifacts. Their expeditions filled the museums of Europe and North America—the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London, Berlin’s New Museum, and the Brooklyn and Metropolitan Museums in New York—with sculptures, architectural elements, papyri, and mummies in painted sarcophagi. Westerners were fascinated by the objects arriving from exotic desert landscapes. Ancient Egyptian shapes and colors came to influence Western clothing, hairstyles, make-up, and architecture. Pharaonic mysteries filtered into books and movies.

Today, the remaining relics of ancient Egypt are protected as the patrimony of the modern Egyptian state and form a major tourist attraction. Twenty-first-century students can learn more about Egypt’s fascinating past at a fine website created by Egypt’s Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage, eternalegypt.org. Other authoritative websites include the British Buseum’s ancientegypt.co.uk, the BBC’s bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians, and the Brooklyn Buseum’s interactive Mummy Chamber at tinyurl.com/brooklynmummy.